Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible (Hardcover)

~ (Author), (Creator) "LATE morning, just before lunch, one of Lin Chi's monks comes up to him half-crazed, out of his mind with ecstasy, babbling about Buddha..." (more)
Key Phrases: celestial agency, pink wife, good girlfriend, Jonah Feldman, Billy Joe, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The set-up goes like this: take two religiously flippant intellectuals (in this case, Manseau and Sharlet, the founding editors of the spiritually hip online magazine Killing the Buddha) and send them on a yearlong road trip to discover the underbelly of America's religious culture. Make sure they mingle with the most wild and weird of holy rollers-a philosophical stripper working out of a converted Baptist church in Nashville, a one-eyed rodeo preacher from the "Cowboy Church" of Texas, a clan of bloodthirsty Jesus freaks in Florida and a cross-dressing terrorist from North Carolina badly in need of an exorcism. Take all these "true" stories, turn them into the "Bible's Book of Psalms," and alternate them with 13 freshly imagined "books" of the Bible, written by iconic American writers such as Rick Moody, Peter Trachtenberg and Haven Kimmel-and, voila, a heretic's Bible is born. Each of the 13 contributors was offered "a solo, a single book from the Bible to be remade, revealed, replaced, inverted, perverted, or born again, however the spirit so led them." The writers came up with seven nonfiction books (e.g., in "Exodus" Francine Prose draws upon her childhood to explain why she can no longer stomach seders) and six books of pure fiction. "Like the original, this Bible crosses freely between genres, between history and prophecy, confession and myth," according to Manseau and Sharlet. As disjointed and freakish as this biblical sequel sounds, the editors manage to pull off a most impressive work. This is some of the most original and insightful spiritual writing to come out of America since Jack Kerouac first hit the road.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

For there to be heresy, there must be orthodoxy, and what is one person's orthodoxy if not another person's heresy? Manseau and Sharlet, cofounders of an Utne Independent Press Award-winning online magazine, here report upon a cross-country odyssey that netted more than a dozen true-life religious experiences, which are recounted in the manner of psalms or songs about the common person and his or her relationship to God. Interspersed with those psalms are 13 books of the Bible, spanning from Genesis to Revelation, rewritten, or rewritten and interpreted, by a variety of authors, poets, teachers, and performance artists, none of whom claims religious authority. Still, the results are marvelous, profoundly personal observations, as diverse as Randall Kenan's fictionalized gospel, about 62-year-old miracle worker Velmajean and the Atomic Reverend "Spike" Horowitz, and Peter Trachtenberg's distillation of the story of Job in a Venn diagram. And the book offers laughter in Manseau and Sharlet's psalm about visiting a Heartland, Kansas, pagan community; tears in Michael Lesy's anguish over being a Levite, hence one of biblical Israel's official executioners. Donna Chavez
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (January 13, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743232763
• ISBN-13: 978-0743232760
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #582,535 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

68 of 77 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Looking for God in America, May 3, 2004

By	Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

I always preferred the sanitized version of that very Zen-like bit of ancient Zen Master advice that is the central idea of this book, namely: If you meet the Buddha by the side of the road, kick him. It was always a bit too much for me to recognize that the actual injunction is to "kill him." What Lin-Chi I-Hsuan (?-867), who is recognized as the founder of the Rinzai school of Zen Buddhism, actually said was:

Kill anything you happen on. Kill the Buddha if you happen to meet him...Kill your parents or relatives if you happen to meet them. Only then can you be free, not bound by material things, and absolutely free and at ease. (from The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, p. 398)

To get a feel for the shock of what Lin-Chi I-Hsuan said, imagine a Christian religious leader saying, "If you meet Jesus by the side of the road, kill him." Of course, that is what the Bible had us doing so long ago. Or think of the experience of seeing the Buddha by the side of the road as similar to seeing Christ's face in the Shroud of Turin. We have done that.

The idea is that whoever you might meet by the side of the road is a fraud. He certainly is not the Buddha. If you follow him you will be following a false path. Therefore kill him.

Or, as the authors of this book have it: "The Buddha you meet is not the true Buddha but an expression of your longing. If this Buddha is not killed, he will only stand in your way." (p. 1)

But I am compelled to point out that this is merely the beginner's understanding of what it means to kill the Buddha. What I-Hsuan was really pointing to is renunciation. The act of killing the Buddha is a symbolic way of renouncing the trinkets of this world and its delusional thinking. It is a way to dispel the false dichotomies, the bugaboos of good and evil; it is a way to throw off the heavy load with which the socialization process has burdened us; and also a way to challenge the biological imperatives of the evolutionary mechanism.

What this renunciation of the pillars and icons of the world leads to is the freedom that comes with nonattachment, sometimes referred to as nirvana or samadhi. As long as we are attached to this world we are not free. Once we are nonattached we can return to the world and draw water, cook rice, and live without delusion or fear. Renunciation, as it leads to nonattachment, paradoxically allows us to regain the world but in a way in which the gross material and biological desires of the world do not affect us.

The authors, along with thirteen contributors who write personal essays on various chapters of the Bible, try to get this point (or at least a similar point) across by looking at religion in America while exposing the absurdities and contradictions in the Bible. It is a little like Jack Kerouac's On the Road meets Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth.

I think Mark Twain would approve of the content, although I suspect he would like the prose to be more direct instead of so preciously wrought. A. L. Kennedy's piece on the "inexplicable" God of Genesis, which sets the tone and opens the book (after an introduction entitled, "Mortal, Eat this Scroll"), is beautiful rendered and intensely felt in a dreamy sort of way: the kind of prose much admired in literary magazines and writer's seminars. We all wish we could write so well. I also liked Peter Trachtenberg's quasi-logical take on the trials and tribulations of Job, to mention two of the essays.

Interspersed between the essays are chapters describing the trek across America taken by Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet. They begin in New York at a Puerto Rican Pentecostal church in the shadow of the towers that are no longer there, and end up in a bikini bar in Geneva, Illinois. (Seems right.) Their experience is filled with gritty Americana, reminding me in its way of Paul Simon's lyric, "They've all Come to Look for America," and Vladimir Nabokov's escape, and a thousand and one road novels inspired by Kerouac.

Their cause is noble. They want to go beyond "a God too small to be God"; that is, beyond a God that has a bellybutton and a bad temper, a God that plays silly games with His creatures, torturing some in hell, rewarding some in heaven, assigning some to purgatory, like some petty, sadistic bureaucrat in the sky

What Mark Twain did for the 19th century, and H.L. Mencken did for the early 20th, Manseau and Sharlet are attempting to do for 21st century America. They write that "killing the Buddha is a metaphor for moving past the complacency of belief, for struggling honestly with the idea of God."

This is key: the idea of God. Such a notion. Is this the God of Swords, the Bronze Age God of Battles, or is this the God of the Vedas, the Ineffable, about which nothing can be said? Or is it the God of Taoism, defined as only a divine tendency, a Way of the World and the Ten Thousand Things? Or is it the God of Zen which we must forever laugh at and kill?

Bottom line: a little too showy in the writing, a little too young in the comprehension, but vivid, worthwhile, and refreshing.

30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finger-licking-good!, January 11, 2004

By	"jsarac" (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews

"Mortal, eat this scroll" is how the book begins, and whether you mean to or not, you will. Perhaps figuratively, perhaps literally (I haven't yet decided what to make for dinner tonight). Guided by skepticiscm and spiritual wanderlust, Sharlet and Manseau lead a chorus of talented writers in creating a work that is beautiful, dangerous, and above all - nourishing.

By no means a feel-good fuzzy of new-age spirituality, each book of scripture asks those questions that make any good religious skeptic sleep with the night light on. In response, each book of psalms brings forward a look at the funny, strange, sad, and sincere quest that is America in search of the divine. Together the voices that emerge - those of the authors, their subjects, and the reader - create a sound that is new and truly original, authentic and unapologetic.

For myself, a life-long skeptic of all religions, this is the only bible I've ever felt inclined to call my own.

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Some Kind of Wonderful, January 7, 2004

By	"annachaffer" (Houston) - See all my reviews

I picked this up because I'm a Rick Moody fan and he wrote this "heretic's bible"'s "Book of Jonah." It's as good as I hoped -- maybe one of his best stories -- and alone worth the price of the book, but the whole thing turned out to be a delicious surprise, almost like a great novel, even though the chapters by outside writers like Moody trade off with chapters by the two main authors, Manseau and Sharlet. Their chapters are called "psalms," and even though these psalms are nonfiction journalism, they're like poems describing all the fascinating ways people love god or hate him or her or check the box marked "other." Their trip across America, from a church near Ground Zero not long after September 11th to rural strip club where all the strippers are religious prophets is inspiring, and the other writers they bring in to join them are provocative. My favorite is Moody's, but don't miss any of them. I'm not religious, but Killing the Buddha makes me believe in the power of stories.